1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an image forming apparatus and, more particularly, to an image forming apparatus to which a unit is detachable.
2. Related Background Art
In an image forming apparatus such as electrophotographic printer, ink jet printer, or the like, a vessel, that is, what is called a cartridge in which a developing agent, ink, or the like is contained and which is detachable to the image forming apparatus main body and enables arbitrary supply or exchange is used. In recent years, many cartridges which cope with various applications have been used in order to meet a variety of requirements for realization of high quality and high precision of an image which is outputted, a high processing speed, and the like. External shapes of those cartridges have been designed in common so that they can be used in common for a number of variety of apparatuses. Discrimination of a kind of cartridge is electrically or mechanically made.
As an example of the electrical discriminating methods, identification information (also referred to as ID information hereinbelow) is stored in the cartridge, the image forming apparatus side reads out the ID information from the attached cartridge, thereby discriminating the kind of cartridge, and an image is formed under conditions according to the kind (for example, refer to JP-A-2002-29042). For this purpose, a plurality of kinds of cartridge information in each of which the ID information of the cartridge and the image forming conditions corresponding thereto are used as a set have previously been registered in the image forming apparatus.
However, since proper image forming conditions cannot be set as for the cartridge of the kind which is not previously registered, it is determined that such a cartridge is incompatible with the image forming apparatus. Thus, such a problem to be solved that the kind of cartridge which is compatible with the image forming apparatus is limited remains.